“Find out all you can about … George Gissing, Karl Marx and Dan Leno!” With these bizarre instructions to his uncomprehending sergeant, the dashing police inspector at the heart of an occult Victorian murder mystery introduces a startling list of celebrity suspects: a novelist, a revolutionary philosopher and a music hall megastar.

Bill Nighy takes a rare non-comic role as the dapper detective John Kildare in 19th-century London, on the trail of a pre-Ripper serial killer nicknamed the Limehouse Golem. Each of these famous figures could be the psychotic murderer, but Kildare’s fourth – and prime – suspect was a fictional failed playwright, one George Cree, who has just been found dead. Cree’s widow, former music hall turn Lizzie (Olivia Cooke), is now charged with his murder, but if Kildare can prove Lizzie knew Cree was the Golem, and killed him in self-defence and to rid London of a monster, Kildare might solve the mystery and save poor Lizzie from the hangman’s noose at the same time – and revive his own career, which had stalled because he is known to be “not the marrying kind”.

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This racy, grisly melodrama is cleverly adapted by screenwriter Jane Goldman from the 1994 novel by Peter Ackroyd, and directed by Juan Carlos Medina, who made the fantasy-horror Painless in 2012. It has been described as a feminist take on the porn mythology of misogynist serial violence, for reasons which are fully revealed at the end but that may not count as exactly feminist. At any rate, it’s an entertainingly bizarre, lurid nightmare with a playfully literary flavour, very Ackroydian, but with hints of Angela Carter and a bit of William Blake.

Daniel Mays is an effective foil to Kildare, as the stolid sergeant George Flood, and Douglas Booth is a rather epicene and solemnly declamatory Dan Leno. Interestingly it is Cooke’s performance that suggests a more natural comic. As with all movies set in shadowy Victorian London, with crowded streets and a sketched outline of St Paul’s on the horizon, there is a lot of digital fabrication and green-screen production design, and sometimes it gets oppressively murky in not quite the right way. But it is carried off very elegantly, not least by Nighy: his pursed lips and bearing may lead you to expect a camp or funny line. The fact that none is forthcoming adds to this movie’s chill. Nighy never smiles. A very literate, bibliophile shocker.